To Lie By Omission
by Terapsina
Summary: When years later the woman who calls herself Vers asks about the morning of the accident, Maria tells the truth in every detail except one. /OR/ Maria's recollection of the day she lost Carol.


**Disclaimer**: Not mine.

**AN**: somewillwin gave me a number of prompts to pick from and I went with 'Day of the accident!'

I am very sorry.

*o0O0o*  
***To Lie By Omission (My Bedroom Door)***  
*o0O0o*

When years later the woman who calls herself Vers asks about the morning of the accident, Maria tells the truth in every detail except one.

When she says that Carol woke her up by banging on the door as was an obnoxious habit of hers, she's not lying - Carol was an early riser and tended to get up with the first rays of the sun, at least an hour or two before Maria would even_ think_ of opening her own eyes; - but when she uses the term 'her door' she's omitting the truth by a significant margin.

It's _their_ bedroom door Carol banged on loudly. Their sheets that Carol had slipped from an hour before with a sleepy kiss that for all that Maria would spend the next six years trying to picture, she'd only ever half remember.

Maria will regret that for a very long time. That she was only half awake for their last kiss.

But that day, - before she knew how the day would end, before she knew that not three hours from then she'd be screaming into the Ground-to-Air radio for Carol to _'Please respond.'_ \- she thought nothing of it. Just smiled at the warm sensation it produced in her chest and fell back to sleep.

To Vers she says none of it. To Vers she gives the facts, almost a mission report.

It's not relevant to what happened six years ago to tell her about the pillow Maria threw at the door when it was time to wake up, or the laughter Carol responded with before she moved on to Monica's room.

She doesn't tell her about flirting over the shared cups of morning coffee or the moment where Carol leaned in to wipe away a bit of maple syrup from the corner of Maria's lips. There's no reason to tell Vers about how she leaned into the touch, or how it left an impression of heat between them even as they went back to finishing their pancakes and sharing jokes with Monica, while they waited for Maria's mother to show up so that they could leave for the airbase.

Those things were something that belonged to only Maria and Carol. And if Vers is no longer Carol, then it would hurt far too much to share them.

That morning is forever burned into Maria's memory. The blue skies and the hot sun and the look on Carols face as she joined Lawson in the cockpit of that test plane.

She remembers all of it. Every second of everything as it all started going wrong when the data they were receiving through the ATN from the plane's systems started sending back failure warnings from one of the wings, and as she watched them crash on the Flight Radar.

She remembers the brief moment after the crash when she heard Carol's voice finally responding to their hails before everything turned back into white noise - the reason she never quite believed Carol dead, she'd known that Carol was still alive after the crash, had _heard_ her.

Everything is still so very clear in her memory, it's as if it happened yesterday. Things didn't turn into a blur for her until the first response team finally got to the scene and reported Lawson dead with no other signs of life.

This she does tell Vers about. Tells her everything she knows, though there's not much she _can_ tell, everything had been buried in so much red tape and confidentiality agreements she'd never really gotten any answers herself.

She doesn't tell Vers about the first few weeks after. Falling asleep with a sobbing five year old in her arms every other night, and half a Dog Tag taunting her from their nightstand. Doesn't tell her she started sleeping on Carol's side of the bed, because otherwise she'd wake up reaching over and expecting to meet the soft skin of her flesh. Says nothing of rushing over to the phone every time it rang, her heart falling to the bottom of her stomach when it wasn't her getting informed that they'd found Carol somewhere out there, having wandered off with a concussion.

Maria tells Vers about losing her best friend. She leaves out all the other things Carol was to her.

But whether her name is Carol or Vers, Maria knows those eyes; and by the look in them she has a feeling that whether the memories are there or not, somehow this woman with the face of Maria's other half… knows anyway.

*o0O0o*

AN2: Hope you liked it. And that I did justice to the awesome character of Maria Rambeau in this short little thing.

Please do tell me what you thought.


End file.
